Is Contact Creator making us complacent?
The way Labour's New Weapon displays CLP statistics could be giving a feeling of false security to campaigners who don't properly understand what they're seeing.
If I log on to Contact Creator right now, I will see the Contact Rate for my constituency at 37%. This includes all voter ID ever done, right back to 1997 (and before, for all I know). Before Contact Creator came in, I only ever used stats showing contact rate in the last 2 years, as that is, I think, the longest period of time before Voter ID starts to get unreliable.
Contact Creator doesn't use as its headline stat contact rate in the last 2 years, or even the last year. All we can see are contacts in the last week and month, and the overall contact rate.
I recently had someone say to me that we were doing fantastically in one marginal ward, and was much more despondent when I explained to him that most of the contacts made were probably now out of date.
We also need to be a bit better at relating our count of Labour promises to our promise target. I have all my promise targets in an excel spreadsheet, but it shouldn't be beyond the wit of man to put an extra little box in Contact Creator somewhere where you can put in the last election results (top 2 candidates & turnout) and have it churn out what your promise target should be. Then we can have our promise target and our current number of Labour promises right next to each other, to give us a much better understanding of what we should be aiming for.


